Review
  • Writing
  • Visuals
  • Morgan Freeman narration
  • Coherence
2

Summary

Release Date: July 25, 2014

Director: Luc Besson

Writer: Luc Besson

Stars: Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Min-sik Choi

MPAA Rating: R

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Lucy is by no means a good movie. But it’s not really a bad movie either. Actually, if I’m being entirely honest, I’m hesitant to even call if a movie. Instead, it feels like an hour and a half of experimental jazz filmmaking created by someone who just downed a baggie full of peyote.

The film feels like a Björk fever dream directed by David Lynch. It starts out simple enough, but quickly devolves into a nonsensical surreal story. Scarlett Johansson plays Lucy, an American living in China who inadvertently finds herself the courier for a high stakes drug deal thanks to her sleazy, manipulative boyfriend.

Lucy ends up with this experimental wonderdrug hidden inside her intestines as the villain, Mr. Jang (Min-sik Choi), forces her to be a drug mule with a ticket back to America. However, the baggie inside her ruptures, leaking the blue crystaline compound into her bloodstream, which then unlocks the “full potential” of her brain.

As Morgan Freeman’s Professor Norman explains in a series of cutaways, human beings only use 10 percent of our brain capacity. (This is, of course, a fallacy, but one Hollywood seems to love perpetuating. Writer/director Luc Besson was wise to hire Freeman to play Norman though, since hearing this urban legend come from his smooth, baritone voice almost had me convinced.) Norman goes on to explain that using more of our brain could theoretically allow us to consciously control every process in our body, as well as the bodies of others. And unlocking 100 percent could lead to untold powers.

As Lucy’s brain function increases, she finds herself able to change her physical features at will, manipulate electronic devices with her mind and toss around bad guys with a simple wave of her hand. Besson seems to believe that unlocking our full potential will grant us magical powers that are a cross between Neo manipulating The Matrix and Jedis wielding the force.

And while all of that falls into a fun sort of crazy that drives the film along, things only get weirder as we approach the climax. It’s about halfway through the film, when Lucy’s body begins to separate into individual particles until she smushes some more blue crystals into her face, that the whole thing starts coming off the rails. But the ending itself is absolutely baffling.

I’m not sure what the right combination of drugs are that one needs to follow what’s happening at the end, but I certainly wasn’t on them and thus was hopelessly lost. Without giving too much away, let me just say that the finale involves time travel, a mystical flash drive and a black pool of sentient goo that is reminiscent of the Venom symbiote from Spider-man.

While certainly the most glaring, the ending isn’t Lucy‘s only problem. Besson makes another decision that kept me from ever really feeling attached to this film.

The other major problem is the fact that Lucy is never really developed as a character. The film does a good job of showing the changes within her as she unlocks more and more of her brain capacity, but we never get a sense of who she was before the transformation, so there isn’t much of a baseline to compare the end result to. The movie begins with her delivering the drugs to Mr. Jang, so we never spend any time learning about her life pre-drugging.

This becomes a glaring problem not just because it gives us nothing to compare the end result to, but also because it makes it hard to relate to Lucy. As her brain becomes more powerful, she becomes less human. She becomes detached from her emotions and from society as a whole. So since we never really bond with her before the transformation, all we are left with is a protagonist devoid of humanity who feels unrelatable. We are left with no one to cheer for.

So while Scarlett Johansson does her best to make the character work, Besson does her no favors with the writing. There are moments when she is flipping around bad guys and being generally bad ass that are quite fun, but most of the film is so bizarre and detached that it’s hard to ever feel very invested in what is happening on the screen.

In Lucy, Johansson proves that she can carry an action film. But it’s convoluted story only taps into 10 percent of her bad ass capabilities. Here’s hoping that the next director to come along and unlock her full potential.

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Written by Joel Murphy. If you enjoy his reviews, he also writes a weekly pop culture column called Murphy’s Law, which you can find here. You can contact Joel at murphyslaw@hobotrashcan.com.